DR. MARIE D'ARCY, who died on November 5th, was the widow of J. N. D'Arcy, a senior official of the Department of Agriculture. They met as students in 1930 during the heady days of the London School of Economics in London, where J.N. had been seconded to the London office.
J.N. was then reappointed to Dublin in 1933, and having completed their family, Marie decided to follow in the footsteps of her brother and sisters. She started her medical studies, which were interrupted by the second World War.
She qualified, an unusual step for women in those days, from the College of Surgeons in 1949. Among her contempories were Karl Mullen, the former Irish rugby captain. She spent most of her medical career in London and Northern Ireland until her retirement in 1974, when she built a house in the West of Ireland and enjoyed the tranquillity of the rural surroundings.
Born in 1907 of an emigrant Jewish family, which fled to London in 1898 from the Russian pogroms, Marie was an amusing and dynamic person with a keen interest in national and world-wide politics.
She leaves four daughters; Claire, an architect who lives in America, Margaretta, author and founder of Pirate Women's radio Galway and wife of the playwright John Arden, Rosemary, consultant microbiologist and wife of David Hone RHA, and Judith, former agricultural journalist to The Irish Times, wife of Christopher, a senior Civil Service lawyer, and 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.